Shadow Government and Mount Pony (Svali Blog Post)

– While the news media feigns surprise and continues to report on the “Shadow Government” deployed outside of Washington to run things in the event of an attack, we who have written about this “Shadow Government” know that this is nothing new. I have to believe there is some purpose to this revelation now, as little is published without the blessings of those in power to use for their own personal agendas. Their are many underground facilities throughout the United States which are set up to house those people that are considered “Essential.” It would be interesting to view the master list, wouldn’t it? What secrets might truly be uncovered if we were to find out who in this nation is truly worthy of surviving a catastrophic incident. When I saw the news article published by the Federation of American Scientists (from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy, Volume 2002, Issue No. 17, March 4, 2002) in which they cited the Washington Post and the Cleveland Plain Dealer and their claims of breaking the news on the “Shadow Government, I became so intrigued that I had to read these stories. One of the sites that was mentioned was Mount Pony in Culpeper, Virginia. One more piece of the amazing puzzle of my own experiences of being experimented on as a child during the Cold War as told in my book “A Nation Betrayed,” suddenly came together.

Sidney Gottlieb who retired from the CIA in 1973 after 2 decades with the CIA, owned a small farm near Boston, Va., about 10 miles northwest of Culpeper, Virginia. The location of his farm seems to be well planned when you understand its proximity to Mount Pony in Culpeper, Virginia. Mount Pony was a 140,000 square foot radiation hardened facility with a 400 foot long bunker, built of steel-reinforced concrete a foot thick and covered by 2 to 4 feet of dirt. Until July 1992 the bunker served as a Continuity of Government facility. The facility was designed to support an emergency staff of 540 for 30 days. Some features of the facility were a cold storage area for maintaining bodies unable to be promptly buried (due to high radiation levels outside), an incinerator, indoor pistol range, and a helicopter landing pad. Until 1988 the facility stored a $1 billion stock of currency to be used to reactivate the American economy following a nuclear attack. Gottlieb’s choice of a home seemed to be no coincidence. Such a highly placed, valuable asset would be privy to many secrets other than those having to do with “Mind Control.” As Ted Gup reports in the Washington Post, “Gottlieb had emerged as a kind of Dr. Strangelove. He had overseen a vast network of psychological and medical experiments conducted in hospitals, universities, research labs, prisons and safe houses, many of them carried out on unsuspecting subjects-mental patients, prostitutes and their johns, drug addicts, and anyone else who stumbled into the CIA’s web. Some had been subjected to electroshock therapy in an effort to alter their behavior. Some endured prolonged sensory deprivation. Some were doped and made to sleep for weeks in an attempt to induce an amnesia-like state. Others suffered a relentless loop of audiotape playing the same message hundreds of thousands of times.” Gottlieb’s obituary in the Times of London began, ‘When Churchill spoke of a world ‘made darker by the dark lights of perverted science’ he was referring to the revolting experiments conducted on human beings by Nazi doctors in the concentration camps. But his remarks might with equal justice have been applied to the activities of the CIA’s Sidney Gottlieb.’Along with Gottlieb’s close proximity to Mount Pony, we have another key figure who lived nearby. Intimately involved in MKULTRA intrigue and the emigration of former Nazis into the US. through the CIA-funded OPC (Office of Policy Coordination) in the State Department was Carmel Offie. He lived less than 20 miles from Sidney Gottlieb on a sizable farm in Markham, Virginia. He handed me over to Allen Dulles and Sidney Gottlieb in 1952 for my first experiments and torture when I was 4 years old. In 1946 Offie was putting together reports on the movement of German scientists from the American Zone into France, individuals who had eluded Paperclip. In the spring of 1948 Carmel was working in Frankfurt at USPOLAD. Burton Hersh reports in The Old Boys, that “One of Offie’s functions at POLAD had been to rake through the flotsam churned up by the postwar disorder—the defunctive Nazi exluminaries and cutthroat émigré politicians and paper mill impresarios of promise—and help the CIC and others plug legitimate experts in around the emerging Cold-War bureaucracies.”

According to Hersh, Carmel Offie was “doubling as a kind of booking agent for many of the refugee scholars” that the U.S. was interested in obtaining. He went to work for Frank Wisner who got Congress to pass the One-Hundred-a Year CIA Act, which allowed Offie to bring in, unmonitored, a hundred refugees each year with their dossiers “Sanitized.” Offie was Wisner’s special assistant for labor and migratory affairs. He personally oversaw the National Committee for Free Europe, which passed OPC money to anti-Communist unions in Europe.

John Loftus reports that Offie worked for the DDU (Document Disposal Unit), which took orders from Dulles. He calls the DDU the OSS “Political Intelligence” experts who wore Army uniforms but were paid through the State Department. In 1949 Offie became responsible for the care of a number of Bloodstone émigrés’. Bloodstone was the codename for the operation, which proposed that 250 Nazi collaborators be brought into the United States who would otherwise be barred by the Displaced Persons Act. Simpson also reports that a special Bloodstone subcommittee had been created to supply false identities, government cover jobs, and secret police protection to selected Bloodstone immigrants.

Carmel Offie was also handling another project employing Nazi collaborators through a U.S.-financed “think tank” named the Eurasian Institute. The Institute was enlisting men who were important members of the German espionage network in Central Asia from 1931 to 1945. Wisner and Offie were still working together in 1950, when Joseph McCarthy referred to Offie as a State Department veteran who “has now been assigned to the Central Intelligence Agency.

These people were true spineless cowards who made sure they would have a safe place to run if there were threats to their survival. Many “Continuity of Government Facilities” were built during the cold war. As reported by the Cleveland Plain Dealer, http://eyesonamerica.org/200110/10190107… “One such facility built into a mountain in Virginia has a hospital, crematorium, emergency power plant, and sleeping cots for 2,000 people. A bunker in a Pennsylvania mountain, known as “Site R,” can accommodate 3,000 people.” Sabrina Eaton reports that “it included a reservoir, medical and dental facilities, dining hall, barber shop and chapel” and that “the government decommissioned similar bunkers at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia and at Mount Pony in Culpeper, Va., in recent years.”

Another report in Taking a Tour of Cold War Baltimore, http://www.citypaper.com/2001-07-18/feat… , “Gimme Shelter Or, Last One Underground Is a Rotten Egg”, “Greenbrier opened in 1962 under a posh resort in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., this capacious bunker — code name ‘Project Greek Island’ — was where Congress was to duck and cover when all the big, bad buttons were pushed. The vast complex includes chambers large enough for both House and Senate to meet.

The article goes on to say that Mount Weather near Berryville, Va., is a vast underground facility, complete with streets, multistory buildings, and a lake large enough for water skiing. A host of governmental higher-ups have sleeping quarters here, including Supreme Court justices. The Federal Emergency Management Agency runs a multitude of disaster-response operations from under the mountain today. Two more sites described in this article are Olney in Montgomery County and Raven Rock. A substantial 1971 bunker that now serves as an Alternate National Warning Center (designed to get the word out when bad things happen) and a Satellite Teleregistration Facility lies beneath what used to be a cow pasture in Olney. Raven Rock also known as “Site R” and colloquially referred to as “the underground Pentagon,” is a 48-year-old megabunker which lies under a mountain just north of the Maryland line near Waynesboro, Pa., close to the presidential retreat at Camp David. For those of us who have endured the silence of those years following the secret experiments carried out on an unwitting public in the name of “National Security,” such revelations come as just another footnote in our untold stories. In the epilogue to a congressional committee report headedby Sen. Frank Church, the committee concluded:”The United States must not adopt the tactics of the enemy. Means are as important as ends. Crises make it tempting to ignore the wise restraints that make men free. But each time we do so, each time the means we use are wrong, our inner strength, the strength which makes us free, is lessened.”Let us remember this when we start giving up our freedoms under the guise that it is necessary for this brave country of ours to survive. It appears that those who really are important already have a place to escape to. Will we?